The Glidd of Glood Blog

Tampering with the code of cricket as bushido

On Saturday 25^thMarch, the Australian cricket team admitted to ball tampering in the third test match of their South African tour. Cameron Bancroft, the team’s most junior member, had been trying, he said later, to improvise some sandpaper with some yellow sticky tape and some dirt granules from the ground. The idea was to rub this confection on one side of the ball in order to scuff it up. This would then make the ball “reverse swing” through the air when bowled, deceiving the South African batsmen. Big deal, you might think.

And of course, you’d be right. There is a civil war in Syria, people are being massacred in the Congo. There are any number of evil things afoot in the world and messing about with a cricket ball seems like a fairly harmless and insignificant concern. First World problems. But then why would the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, immediately feel that he had to get involved and roundly condemn his fellow countrymen and sporting superstars? Because.

To begin with, it transpired that the ball-tampering incident, which is expressly forbidden by the rules of the game, wasn’t some wild, whacky scheme invented by the side’s most naïve player. It was, in fact, the result of a planned strategy which had evolved from a “Leadership Team” meeting. In other words, the captain, Steve Smith, and the vice-captain, David Warner, had decided that the best thing that they could do at this juncture of the game was to cheat. It was an entirely premeditated course of action. One again, it’s not as if cheating in sport is anything new; it’s going on all the time. It is institutionalised in cycling and athletics and has been state-sponsored and organised within Russian Olympic teams. Eastern European weightlifting women have all got moustaches.

But cricket is different, or at least it should be. The Japanese have their bushido, the code of ethics of the samurai class. The English-speaking peoples, with the notable exception of the Americans, have cricket. Cricket is a game of infinite subtleties and one that is almost impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t tried to play it. Inhabitants of non-cricket-playing countries just don’t get it. They can’t see the point. What they don’t understand is that cricket is the point in itself.

This is made apparent when you listen to Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4 – the programme that goes on all day telling you about action you can’t see. It is probably more exciting than the cricket itself. What comes across is that the result of any cricket match is secondary to the entertainment of the match itself and more importantly the spirit in which it was played. A batting collapse is felt as ignominy because it appears as if the batting side have just given up and rolled over. And that isn’t on. When the West Indies, now a shadow of their former glorious selves, beat England in a test match last year in England, the sentiment was that this was a good thing. It was good because it was good for cricket, never mind that the national team had just lost to a supposedly second-rate one. This was an indication of a West Indian cricketing spring. The cricket-lover wants everyone to be good at cricket. National glory, at least in England, comes second to this sentiment.

The ethics of cricket have entered the language in a myriad ways. “It’s just not cricket” means that something is deeply unethical and to be frowned upon. You “keep a straight bat” when dealing with potentially ethically dubious matters. You “play the game”. And so it goes on. Cheating, clearly, “just isn’t cricket”.

The sad reality, though, is that cricket is not, in fact, as chivalrous a pastime as the cricket fan would like to think. The most obvious example of this is “sledging” which is a form of psychological warfare aimed at a batsman in order to put him off his game. This might be just amusing banter, but it often seems to degenerate into personal invective and insults which are so noxious that you wouldn’t want to be sharing a pint with your adversaries after the game. Any game where you can’t share a pint with your adversaries afterwards is not being played in the right spirit. And the past masters of sledging are the Australians.

In cricket, whilst there is huge respect for the Australians as a team, based on their determination and ability to win, there isn’t much love for them. For an Englishman, it doesn’t really matter who you lose to so long as it isn’t the Australians. The South Africans can’t stand them, and Australia has always looked down its nose at New Zealand who probably don’t appreciate the attitude. Australia takes itself very seriously as a sporting nation. Australia is sport, in the same way as Sparta or Rome was fighting. The notion of Australianness is inseparable from sporting prowess. And senior members of the Australian cricket team are demi-gods. As Turnball said, the captain of the national cricket team is far more important in the land than any politician.

So, what is the reaction of the Australians when they find out that their heroes have been cheating? Disbelief, disavowal, rage. All the love that they lavished upon these people is, at one fell swoop, retracted. We are, in some respect, the sporting heroes that we admire, or at least, we like to think we are. Just like David and Goliath being picked to represent the Jews and the Philistines so that the greater armies didn’t have to fight, so the players in our national teams are our proxies. If they are cheats, we are, by extension, cheats. How sad for all passionate cyclists to see that nearly all top cyclists are in fact cheats, that their hobby is pervaded by cheating. They become, in some way, lesser people themselves.

“Cheat, cheat, no reason to be fair.

Cheat, cheat, or don’t get anywhere.

If you can’t win, cheat.”

Sang The Clash

We now live in a world where cheating is all pervasive. Everyone in power is syphoning off public money to their own bank accounts. Everyone who earns any money is hiding it from the taxman in offshore accounts. Corporations are cheating enterprises. No one is playing fair.

But one thing you could rely on in all this is that cricket is being played fairly because cricket is synonymous with fairness. So long as cricket was fair, there was a hope for mankind. Ludicrous hyperbole or course, but somehow, this is what the cricket-conscious public thought. And then you find out that the world’s most prominent cricket team was cheating. It was cheating, and having meetings planning on how and when to cheat. And for Australians, at any rate, it was admitting that it might not be able to beat South Africa without cheating…

And then it transpired that the culprits had been lying about the cheating. They hadn’t been using a Heath Robinson ball-scuffing device made of sticky tape and dirt, they’d been using something a whole lot more sensible: sandpaper. And then, after cheating and lying, they did something else even more un-Australian. They all burst into tears.

It was at this point that that the cricket-ball-tampering-conscious public divided swiftly into two camps. In camp A were all the people whose hearts now melted: “Aw, we’re being too hard on the poor guys. All they wanted to do was win for us. Everyone makes mistakes. Leave ‘em alone, they’re still young!”. And in camp B: “And now they’re blubbing about it for Christ’s sake! You couldn’t make it up!”

But we were all mostly in Camp B. Not for the cheating. Not even for the premeditated cheating. Or the lying. But for the fact that as a team, the current Australian cricket side had been obnoxious for years, unpleasant to their opponents, swaggering, hubristic, full of themselves. They had spouted off about how they were the moral guardians of the values of cricket when anyone who played against them felt this to be a cavernously hollow boast. Nope. The chickens had come home to roost. They brought this upon themselves, and now we were going to enjoy watching them squirm.

Cameron Bancroft, gone for 9 months. No big deal, as the Aussie team doesn’t even have any test matches lined up for the next 8. But then, he was the least experienced member of the side and there are plenty more to choose from. Why pick a cheat? He’ll have to play some remarkable cricket to get himself back into the side.

Steve Smith, gone for a year and won’t be considered in a leadership role for at least two. But realistically, he won’t captain Australia again. In cricket, captaincy is all about judgement and he has shown he doesn’t have any. Still, he is a prodigious batsman so he will reappear in a year or so when his countrymen have found something else to be outraged about. Well he might breakdown in front of the media, as he watches his IPL contract in India and his lucrative sponsorship deals flow away on the tide of his tears. Bye-bye millions of dollars.

And what of the toxic David Warner, the man who was surely behind the whole thing (but who steadfastly refused to say that he was)? He also has become instantly unemployed and several million dollars poorer. He managed a few sniffles of crocodile tears as he finally faced the cameras and microphones, days after his teammates, but he wouldn’t say that it wasn’t the first time the cheating had occurred, just blithely stuck to his prepared script, almost certainly thrashed out for him by his lawyers. The vice-captain will not, in the future, be considered for any further leadership roles. And doubtless, Australia will find that he isn’t that indispensable in any case. The team will move on and David Warner will be consigned to the footnotes of sporting history. He will surface on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, where, after scoffing a few witchetty grubs, he’ll be voted off at the first available opportunity, unless he really does take his time out to reflect on “who he is as a man” and hopefully enact some change.

And the coach Darren Lehmann? Gone too, permanently. Well, he was the orchestrating conductor of this sorry side. If they were so reviled, what does that say about the culture he created for the team? How sorry should we all be?

I can’t believe that people with no interest in cricket will have read this far, but if they have, imagine this: Imagine that Roger Federer is suddenly shown up to be a cheat and that he isn’t, after all, the ideal sportsman, possessed of prodigious talent, intelligent, magnanimous in victory, stoic in defeat, hardworking, multilingual, charitable and humorous. Suppose he was suddenly shown to be a sham. See? How would you feel then, eh? So yes, a little ball-tampering between friends is no big deal, but then again, it is, isn’t it?

The irrelevancy of the FIFA Blatter succession

By the time you read this, the FIFA election will have happened and a new president will have been voted in. As if we cared.

We don’t care because nothing much will change at FIFA. Nothing much will change, because the very idea of FIFA is flawed and will mean that it can’t change in substance. FIFA exists principally to organise the World Cup, rake in all the cash it generates, and then supposedly distribute that cash around the world in football-esq projects. You have to think, therefore, that the president of FIFA is a sort of Father Christmas character who just showers you with money. Once he has given you the money, his job is pretty well done. What you decide to do with it, in your country, is somewhat up to you. Perhaps some of it never leaves Switzerland; it just changes bank accounts. Some of it will be used to build a new stadium, a plush football headquarters, or at least partially build those things. There certainly doesn’t appear to be a great deal of governance.

The idea of democracy is that it promotes fair and inclusive government. The fairer, more inclusive and less corrupt a government is, the better a country or organisation is generally run which is why the Western democracies set such store on probity. FIFA looks very democratic, from the outside. Every country gets a vote; every country gets a say. Unfortunately, that means that Vanuatu’s opinion is just as important as Germany’s, which in football terms doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense. There are a lot more footballers and football fans in Germany than in Micronesia. The other essential problem for most of the world, is that their only interest in FIFA is how much money they are going to get out of it. This would imply that it’s quite easy to buy their votes, even if none of the money was actually remitted in a brown envelope or to an offshore bank account.

Arte’s 2 hour, TV documentary Planet FIFA showed how, from the very moment that FIFA took to the international stage, corruption was endemic and institutionalised. Votes are bought for everything, from the presidency, to the attribution of World Cups. Sponsorship deals are corrupt as well. FIFA really is a Mafia.

Voting in a new president, in these circumstances, is just like putting a sticking plaster on someone with several broken ribs, a broken leg and a ruptured spleen: it’s just not going to make any difference whatsoever. The real solution would be for the Swiss to dissolve the whole enterprise on the premise that it is in fact a criminal organisation. Then FIFA could be totally rebuilt anew on entirely different principles.

It’s a money-making enterprise and thus should be run like any other money-making enterprise. Company boards are not elected by their suppliers or even customers. People are sought and appointed to the top jobs. It’s not perfect, but it seems to be better than most other systems. Paradoxically, democracy just can’t work in some circumstances.

I’m not big on presidents. You might think that the purpose of a president would be to preside over meetings, get buy-in, smooth the waters, help set policy and direction. But these days, presidents appear to be more like kings, living in palaces, travelling first class, setting the rules, consolidating their powerbases. You only have to look at France to see that the kings and emperors never really went away. They are just called presidents now. And naturally, there is barely a credible president in the whole of Africa. If you want see a real presidency in action, ironically you need look no further than Switzerland where the presidency of the governing council changes every year, and president is a purely honorary title – the person who has to do all the protocol for foreign visits and the like.

It is heartening to see that the FIFA president, whatever else they do with the organisation, now only gets one term of 4 years. Their time with their nose in the trough now being limited at least to some degree. The idea of someone like Blatter going on and on and on is quite clearly ridiculous. He saw himself as a king, demanding to be treated in all countries like a head of state. And what guarantee do we have that the future president won’t expect the same honours?

FIFA is not fit for purpose and it’s high time it bit the (Qatari) dust.

Lord’s 2nd Ashes Test – England were “shithouse”

Bewildered English cricketers

 

When I lived in Australia for most of a year sometime in the 80s, I was introduced to a new term: “shithouse”.

This is the Australianism for something that is indescribably, unacceptably poor or beneath contempt. It’s a great expression. It’s a lot more damning than “pants” which just means “very poor”, and it somehow has a greater depth of meaning than just “shit” which somehow misses a certain element of contempt that the word “shithouse” conveys.

I am sure that elements of my work, or ideas were labelled “shithouse” by my colleagues in Australia, especially by a Brit who worked there who had taken to the Aussie term with wholeheartedness.

Yesterday Captain Cook told the BBC that the England performance at Lord’s had been “unacceptable”. Even Michael Clarke would not have employed the term “shithouse” to the media following his team’s Cardiff defeat last week. But I am willing to bet that it was the word used in the Aussie camp to describe what they all thought of losing the first Test.

It’s a word that England badly need to focus their minds on the next Test. Will they feel extremely angry at having lost at Lord’s, as I bet Australia did after Cardiff? Or will they just be disappointed and bewildered? It seems to me that anger is what the Aussie cricket team do best and what stimulates their superb performances.

Whatever, when you take 10 wickets in a match to the opposition’s 20, and score 400 runs to the opposition’s 800, then the only word that adequately describes your performance and can boost your aggression levels for the next confrontation is indeed, “shithouse”.

The Football Cheats

Arjen Robben goes down in spectacular fashion against Mexico

Well, it’s been a pretty good World Cup so far in terms of entertaining games and goals scored. One of the features has surely been that there isn’t really that much to choose between the teams. Even the supposedly weaker countries have been able to give the stronger, more fancied teams a run for their money or even knock them out. Costa Rica, Group D’s supposed whipping boys, soon put paid to that little theory by knocking out both Italy and England.

But one thing that has stood out is the willingness to cheat of some of the star players – people whose talent is so great that they don’t really need to cheat. There have been four stand-out incidents so far which have left a bitter taste in the mouth. In the tournament’s opening match between Brazil and Croatia, the Brazil striker Fred’s one real contribution to his side’s eventual success was crumpling to the ground under the challenge from Croatia’s Lovren. In fact, he didn’t so much crumple to the ground, as throw himself rearwards as if he had been yanked off balance by the defender. Replays showed that this response to very limited contact was massively exaggerated, but he got a penalty anyway. It was the turning point of the match and tainted the Brazilian team’s eventual success.

The next incident was in the Germany – Portugal game. A little run-of-the-mill argy-bargy  between the German striker Thomas Müller and the Portuguese defender Pepe resulted in Müller going down as if he had been pole-axed. Pepe was annoyed about the over-reaction and went head to head with the still prostrate Müller to give him a piece of his mind. From a distance it looked aggressive (it was), possibly a head-butt (it wasn’t). So Müller set a trap and Pepe fell into it and was sent off. Müller went on to score a hat-trick and was named man of the match as Portugal lost 4-nil with 10 men, but it was his cheating subterfuge that set up the whole situation that caused Portugal’s thrashing.

Next up, the infamous biting incident between Uruguay’s Luis Suárez and Italy’s defender Giorgio Chiellini. For the third time in his career, Suárez has bitten an opponent. You get hackers in the game who specialise in bone-crunching, intimidating tackles which are often dangerous. But Suárez is in a class of his own by simply tucking in to his adversaries. It’s bizarre behaviour – really bizarre. And it is quite clear that it doesn’t have much to do with football, or even with bona fide cheating to gain an unfair advantage. Setting about people with your teeth is just odd. It wouldn’t really be headline news were not Suárez one of the game’s most brilliant players at the moment, having scored 31 goals for Liverpool last season. Given that amount of talent and ability, why would you feel it necessary to start biting people?

Surely the best game of the tournament so far has been the match between Spain and the Netherlands – though probably not if you are Spanish. Holland crushed Spain 5-1 with 2 goals each from Van Persie and Robben which were complete class. It’s hard to know which was the best one – the astonishing Van Persie diving header from a long ball, or the quite blistering turn of speed shown by Robben to outrun defenders and blast the ball into the back of the net. This is football at the highest level. So what was Robben thinking of a couple of weeks later when he made the most ridiculous dive in the match against Mexico? In fact, he dived three times in the match and was finally awarded a penalty that won the Dutch the game. Well, he was probably thinking that he could cheat and win the game for his country and he was right. He even apologised for it afterwards, but of course, by then Mexico were history. It’s just so sad that a player of his outstanding ability feels he has to conduct himself in this manner. When you look at the slo-mo replays of his dives, they look ridiculously exaggerated – just laughable. But then referees have no access to slo-mo replays – a pity as if they did, this sort of thing could be stamped out.

The thing is that cheating has become endemic in football. In fact, it has become such a part of the game that it is now considered completely normal behaviour to cheat – even praiseworthy if you sacrifice yourself to some red or yellow card through blatant cheating, should that mean snuffing out a chance for the opposition to score a goal. Contrast this with the storm that was created by the English cricketer Stuart Broad when he failed to walk at the Trent Bridge test match against Australia last year. He hit the ball, it was caught in the slips but he just stood there and the umpire strangely did not give him out, although both he and the whole Australian team knew that he was out. He went on to contribute massively to England’s score.

What is interesting here is that Broad was under no obligation to walk technically, as the umpire did not give him out. But that is beside the point for cricketing fans. If you think you are out, you walk – it’s the gentlemanly thing to do. Staying put is not illegal, but it’s against the spirit of the game. It just isn’t cricket. Oh how wonderful it would be to see this sportsmanship suddenly descend on football. For a start, we’d see a lot more goals and the matches would be vastly more entertaining. 

It really does seem to be football that is riddled with the cheating cancer, as rugby isn’t. Rugby is a violent game, but it’s a game that could easily spiral completely out of control were players to start cheating willy-nilly. It’s as if this is somehow understood by participants and the international matches at least (as these are the only ones I look at) are amazing for their fair play.

Why should we care? Because sports should be played under the ethos of sportsmanship. The game is governed by rules, and if you ignore them, there really isn’t any point in playing the game which is, of course, essentially pointless. It’s the same reason you don’t steal, even if you could; it’s because it diminishes you. Football and the World Cup in particular, has a powerful effect on nations. It’s surrogate war. It’s the same sort of thing as the armies in bygone times choosing a champion to represent them so that they didn’t all have to die (which, you will remember, is the back story to the David and Goliath myth). So to cheat just diminishes your nation, makes you look weak and cowardly. Better to fail nobly than to win by cheating.

Sadly, this point of view is not necessarily widely shared. Many are those who feel that winning is the important thing and if you have to cheat to get there, well, you are just cleverer than the opposition if it gets you the right result. It is a point of view that is increasingly adopted in all walks of life. You only have to look at the shenanigans in the banking sector to see that cheating, dishonesty and dissimulation are rife and this also permeates politics, or even business as a whole. By tolerating rampant cheating in football, in matches watched by millions globally, a message is sent that this is the way to live life. Nice guys come second; to the victor go the spoils. If you can’t win, cheat.

You also can’t fail to notice that FIFA, football’s governing body, is an organisation of cheats. Seemingly every time some scrutiny is applied to their actions, they are seen to come up short. Bribe-taking and financial mismanagement just appear to be part of the FIFA set-up. It’s its own banana republic, complete with suitcases of cash and undersized dictator who is seemingly glued to his presidential seat. Given the lack of moral probity of its ruling organisation, is it any wonder that football has no idea of what fair play really means?

The England football team - is it really a question of talent?

Daniel Sturridge - 2nd highest Premier League goal-scorer

You can’t have a World Cup and a blog that posts random thoughts and ideas without a bit of unqualified football punditry. Mind you, none of the qualified football punditry has ever made any difference to the fortunes of the England team for the past 4 and half decades. But football is all about enjoyment, or it should be, and unqualified punditry is one of the joys of the sport.

One comment I read seemed to open an interesting line of enquiry. The people of England are always disappointed about the performance of their team, claiming that there are too many foreigners in the Premier League. There may be a valid criticism here, but it does miss a point. Manchester City won the title this year with no English players in their first 11. Teams in the Premier League have no room for sentiment and operate, at least as far as their chances of winning are concerned, on the basis of pure economics. Bearing in mind that Manchester City seem to have unlimited funds to buy whoever they want, you suspect that there are no English players that Manchester City want to buy. It was a similar situation with Chelsea a few years ago – no English players in their starting 11.

So this would seem to indicate that English supporters’ expectations are way out of line with the reality. If we had a team that was going to win World Cups, you’d see evidence of that in the values that Premiership clubs place on England players. It is somehow claimed that the Premier League is completely different from all other leagues in this respect and it is this which is causing our downfall. But is this really the case?

Here is a list of the top scorers last season in the Premier League. As you can see, although Luis Suárez topped the charts easily, Sturridge was 2nd and Rooney was 4^th. The amazing Robin van Persie was only 15^th, beaten both by Rickie Lambert and Steven Gerrard. Well then, let’s have a look at the Bundesliga which, seeing as Germany is such a good team and Müller has already got a hat-trick, must look completely different. Well, well. The top German striker, Marco Reus, is only 4^th. The 3^rd best striker is Josep Drmic, and he’s Swiss (supposedly). The great German striker, Mesut Özil, doesn’t even appear to figure in the top 50 Premier League scorers – so a long way behind several English players. And what of the deadly Thomas Müller? He is in 11^th place with 13 goals – about the same as Gerrard and Lambert, then.

We may as well check out La Liga, seeing as Spanish football has been so dominant over the past few years. And we find, once again, that a Spaniard does not occupy top spot amongst the most prolific scorers last season. It’s the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo with 31, followed by the Argentinian Lionel Messi with 28. The top Spanish goal scorer is Diego Costa in 3^rd place.

Clearly, football isn’t just about scoring goals, but in some ways, of course, it is. The Portuguese are showing that despite having Ronaldo in their team, they are very second rate, and Argentina took 90 minutes to see off Iran (and they have Sergio Agüero too – the joint 4^th best Premier League goal scorer) – only getting out of jail thanks to Messi’s brilliance. But however you want to look at it, the stats indicate that English strikers are no worse at scoring goals than their foreign counterparts. You might use this fact as a yardstick for assessing other, less-goal-scoring players. Is there any reason to believe that English players in other parts of the park are less good than foreigners, that in some way, if you could have statistics on them, they’d prove to be utterly second best? This seems, on the face of it, improbable.

So, going back to Manchester City, then, if English players are, in fact, pretty good, why don’t any of them play for City (there’s been Milner – often unimpressive, and Joleon Lescott, so unimpressive that he’s been signed by my club, West Bromwich Albion, for next season, where, I am sure, he will fail to impress)? It’s simple maths. There are 32 teams competing in the World Cup finals, and plenty of good players whose teams didn’t make the competition. If you can sign anyone you want, statistically, an English player would have about a one in four chance of making the cut for a starting 11. (11 places divided by about, say 40 countries).

This would all seem to indicate that English players aren’t, individually that bad, and probably no worse than the competition. Other good teams on paper have been very poor so far, notably Argentina and Belgium. Brazil haven’t been amazing. Whereas the French team, which boasts no astonishing talents compared to others and which only just managed to qualify for the finals, has been very impressive. And what of Costa Rica, or even the USA? These final two teams have players who play in the nether regions of the Premier League, or not even in it - so no real stars - and yet they have looked every bit as good as many other more fancied teams.

So what is the answer? I suspect there may be two things to look at: 

The first, is that talented sportspeople, just like anyone really, tend to choke on specific occasions. Given the big occasion, their talent deserts them and they play horribly. A great example of this was Switzerland in their first match, where they played so badly in the first half that they would have been easy prey for the Faroe Islands. Switzerland are in fact a surprisingly good team much of the time – which is why they are so highly ranked by FIFA (though I accept that FIFA doesn’t amount to much in the credibility rankings for anything). The luck they had was that Ecuador were also rubbish. Phew! So players who might play with relaxed abandon on yet another Premier League Saturday may suddenly tense up and choke when in the England shirt. After all, the pressure on them is massive.

It strikes me that the same sports psychologists who seemed to work wonders for Britain’s Olympic medal hopes could be very well employed here. Yoda (I know it starts to sound shaky when you quote Hollywood puppets) famously says, “Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try”, when Luke Skywalker has said that he’ll give something a go. At another juncture, when Luke says “I don’t believe it”, he rejoins “That is why you fail”. I don’t think the English team (well, not since 1966, yawn) have ever believed they will win the World Cup. To do really well, you’d have to be convinced that you could win it.

It’s a terrible truism that successful people (and winning sportspeople in particular) are so convinced of their genius that they just assume they will win. I wonder if Louis Hamilton thinks that he’ll give a race his best shot, but that if he makes the top 10, it’ll be a good effort? I suspect he is convinced that he can win and is bitterly disappointed if he doesn’t. The thing about truisms is that they stem from the word truth – that is pretty much how things are. So it would appear that the mental attitude of the English team is at fault, not their ability to play football well as individuals on most occasions.

The second, and somewhat obvious thing to look at, is that football is, surprise, surprise, a team game. Although having great talent on the pitch is a very handy way to start a match, it seems obvious that you can still accomplish great things with average talent, or equally, amount to nothing with outstanding players. The French in the last World Cup were incapable of playing as an effective unit and would have been thrashed by the team playing in this one. But many of the players are the same, and this team is in no way superior to the old team in terms of talented individuals. If Costa Rica has surprised everyone, it’s because they play far better as a team than their talent pool would suggest they should. And we can go back to the Euro 2004 which was won by Greece, despite having a team of largely unknown players and who managed to beat the far more fancied Portugal not once, but twice on the road to victory. The only way they could have achieved this was by being an effective team, rather than being a loose collection of largely indifferent individual players.

So instead of focusing on finding and nurturing hidden talent, which doesn’t, on the face of it, appear to be much worse than anyone else’s, England should really be concentrating on what they have to do to get these people to play together as an über team. Not being a football coach or a sports psychologist, I have no idea what the answer to this is, but I am sure that there is no shortage of professional people who can bring something to this party. So when Harry Redknapp says that “England don’t have a payer” in Doha, or wherever that World Cup ends up being held, I for one am just thankful that he wasn’t made England manager. The correct answer is that with the players they have, the right mental attitude and appropriate “team glue” the England team in 8 years time could be the complete favourites for the competition.

 

The 2013 England Ashes debacle - let's get angry

Well thank God that’s over. While the Ashes was on, I wasn’t getting as much sleep as I should. I wasn’t being kept awake worrying about England’s woeful performance, but being kept awake trying to catch a little of the commentary. This in itself was no mean feat. For some weird contractual reasons, it was impossible to get Test Match Special in Switzerland from the BBC website, whereas it works like a charm for Test series taking place in the UK. But after a lot of surfing, I happened upon an Australian stream for it which did work. Ha! Fooled you!

I really can’t sum up any better the English team’s performance and what I feel about it than the BBC correspondent Tom Fordyce here on the BBC website. That’s one of the good things about failure; it has far greater comic potential than success. Is this why the English are such a funny race?

As England crashed to the inevitable 5-nil whitewash, in a series where they didn’t manage to put in one creditable performance, except for one day of the Fourth Test, Aggers interviewed Alastair Cook. Cook said he felt “frustration” about the way he and the team had played, as well as… “anger is not the right word”.  Well, as I sat fuming slightly under the duvet listening to his interview, seeing as England had not so much lost 5 matches on the trot, but been totally humiliated, I was thinking that perhaps anger ought to be the right word. Anger makes you bold, devil-may-care, fearless, determined. You couldn’t apply any of those epithets to the English team. They might have worked hard, been disappointed, been frustrated, but clearly they just weren’t angry enough. I’d have been pretty angry after the First Test, almost incensed after losing the first three and the Ashes, and would have been so pissed off that by the Fourth Test, there would be no way the Australians would have got a whitewash. But this England team just rolled over. If they could have hidden behind a bush from Johnson’s missiles, they would have done. And that, ultimately is what is so galling about their pathetic Antipodean results.

Cook seems like a really nice guy, a top bloke. But is he too nice? Just how angry can he get? I am totally unqualified to know whether he should stay on as captain, but it appears he is going to anyway. I contrast him with an Aussie side who, you suspect, has no difficulty in getting angry about anything. Ire seems to bubble beneath the surface of nearly all successful Australian sportsmen, which, you feel, is often why they are so successful. Pietersen does a good line in anger and petulance, so Vaughn is probably right when he says that he needs to be more involved in the team rather than sitting in a huddle by himself. We could use some of that anger.

Still, there is no point just brooding on a crappy result; you have to find some sort of positives, and here they really leap out at you.

For a start, the Aussie whitewash has done no end of good to the Ashes rivalry. The next series in 18 months time is to be eagerly awaited. The last series in England was slightly lacking in intensity as England were taking on a side who hadn’t won a Test series of any description for years. As Australia were beaten 3-nil, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for them; you felt they clearly deserved a more flattering scoreline. Feeling sorry for your Ashes opponents is no way to attack a series. On the pitch at least, you have to viscerally dislike them – this is, after all, one of sport’s great rivalries. Happily when the Ashes next come to England, the MCC should have no difficulty in seeking vengeance for what can easily be seen as a personal slight.

The second reason why the whitewash is positive is that the Australian public might have been falling out of love with cricket. Sport, and particularly the national team’s success in any sport, is massively important in Australia, far more so than in England where failure is usually greeted (as this will be) by a muttered whinge and a shrug of the shoulders. It would be a calamity if Australia gave up on cricket and started focusing, like nearly the entire rest of the world, on, gulp… football.

The third reason, linked to the second, is that cricket desperately needs Australia. Now that the once great West Indies are only interested in sprinting and perhaps basketball, cricket has been reduced to a tiny handful of great cricketing sides. There is South Africa, India, England and Australia. Pakistan were woeful when they last visited England (although they triumphed in their series versus the MCC when they played them abroad in sweltering heat). Sri Lanka and New Zealand are good sides, but not the world’s best Test sides. So if Australia was going to be a pale incarnation of their heroic sides of yesteryear, it was all looking a bit thin at the top. Now that the Aussies are back to their best, we can all relax again for a few years.

Test cricket has had a reputation for being a long and drawn-out snooze fest. Not this series, which has seen wickets clattering and boundaries scored all day every day. Thanks to the spineless English batting performance, no match has actually made it to a fifth day. This is probably bad for the organisers, but perhaps good for cricket.

So all in all, we should thank the Australians for whipping us. They have done us all a great service. Thanks, guys.

London 2012 and IOC in edible medal row

 Peckish judo bronze medalist Marti Malloy of the United States tucks in before the medal ceremony is even over

Officials at the International Olympic Committee caused a storm today when they admitted that the outsized medals being awarded to successful competitors at London 2012 were in fact made of chocolate rather than gold, silver or bronze.

According to an IOC spokesperson, the London 2012 organising committee approached the IOC for help when, running seriously over-budget, it realised it just did not have the funds necessary for buying the precious metals required to cast the projected Olympic medals.

“They said they would be compelled to reduce the medals to the size of a 10p piece in order to stay within their budget. We felt that this would be unacceptable and would make a laughing stock of medal winners on the podium and in the media.”

The IOC, based in Lausanne Switzerland, came up with a surprisingly creative solution. “We met the Swiss chocolate maker Lindt, who has expertise in making chocolate medals, and asked them to produce the London 2012 ones in gold, silver and bronze colours. This decision reduced the expenditure on medals by about 99%, so we took the opportunity to make them bigger than originally planned. Our only worry was that in hot weather they might melt, but we were advised by the London 2012 organising committee that there was very little chance of that occurring.”

Commentators have been quick to point out how cruel it is to award Olympians chocolate medals, as they will either have to eat them or watch them grow stale. To add to the scandal it has been revealed that the chocolate in the medals is strictly identical whatever the colour of the foil, making a mockery of the ethos of Olympic gold.

Olympic cycling time trialist gold medal winner Bradley Wiggins said this morning that he “felt cheated” and “let down” and that “had I known I was training to win a bar of Galaxy, I wouldn’t have bothered”.

 

Fighting cows at the Tortin Inalp - what happens when the skiers have all gone home

 

We're at the bottom of Tortin, the famous black run in Verbier which makes the hearts of the less competent skiers quail. But the snow has all melted, and the tourists have gone home. There are no more Moncler jackets on the slopes, no more Chanel specs and Jet Set suits.

Like fairies at the bottom of the garden that appear when no one is around to see them, the Swiss have come back to reclaim their pastures and the ski slopes take on a whole different complexion. This is the face of the Alps that most of the winter-sporting tourists never see. It is the day of the Inalp, when the mountains take on their other, older visage and revert to providing grazing for cattle. If you dropped something off a chair lift, it is now that some cow will discover it.

 

The Inalp is when the cows are led up from the valleys to their summer home, grazing on the grass and Alpine flowers that appear when the snow has finally receded. But at Tortin in the Valais, these are not just any old cows. They are the fighting cows of the race d'Herens, the black and muscular animals that now seemingly serve no purpose apart from entertaining their often wealthy owners. It is time to have a fete, a party, and in the Valais tradition with a lot of melted cheese and local wine. It's all very traditional: Alpine horns and the sort of music that is never going to be featured on MTV. There is even a bell-strap repairer on hand to make good the damaged leather that inevitably results when the cows get stuck in.

  

The cows are already here and having been let out for a bit of a scuffle in the morning, they are now chilling out in the cowshed, having a lie-down and a chew before coming out for round two in the evening. For it is in the early days of the Inalp that the cows will establish the pecking order that will determine their social hierarchy for the rest of the summer. Cows come from different farms to be lumped together in the Alpine pasture for a few months. In each stable, the cows will already have established their hierarchy. They will have decided this last year for the most part and there is already an understanding as to who is the Queen of the cowshed. But now that they are meeting strange cows from different sheds, the process has to start again on a bigger scale. Who is going to be Queen of the larger herd? That is what everyone is here to find out.

At half past five, the cows are led out of the shed to a roped-off area of the pasture where they get on with the business of roughing each other up. There is a tremendous clonking of huge bells, a lot of pawing of the ground in areas that quickly become dusty pits. Like a school playground, they go around in gangs, with lesser cows from the same herd happy to defend their queen and lend a helping hoof when she is defied by some pretender. Men with stout sticks are on hand, reading the complicated game, to ensure that the fighting doesn't degenerate into gang warfare. Fights have to be on a strictly one-to-one basis. The spectators, like sporting spectators anywhere, add their expert commentary.

 

 

It's easy to spot the toughest beasts. The stable queens have red numbers on their flanks, the others only white numbers. Naturally, a lot of the fights tend to be between rival queens. Quite how the cows keep track of it all, I have no idea, but they do, and after a few days, one of them will become Queen of the pasture - la Reine - and they will all be able to settle down for reasonably trouble-free grazing for the rest of the summer. There will still be spontaneous fights, but they are sporadic and only witnessed by the cowherds.

There is massive prestige attached to having a Queen, and owning a fighting cow is not a cheap business. I was told that the running costs for a cow are about CHF 9'000 a year - that's over £5'000. The cows seemingly have no real purpose apart from getting involved in a bit of agro. From what I can make out, they aren't milked and they are not generally eaten for meat (although it can be found). There are a lot of breeds available that are more suitable for either purpose. So you have to think of the fighting cows as sort of pets to be cherished and admired. Their whole uselessness is superb in this day and age of economic utility.

Europe in uproar as teams disappoint

Raymond  Domenech. Not one of his better weeks. 

The Mundial is livening up nicely both on and off the pitch. The matches are getting better as the teams get over their first game nerves and the stakes get steadily raised. The Brazil – Ivory Coast match was fun, even if there was quite a bit of theatre towards the end. Brilliant second goal by Fabiano, just a pity that it was a double “shoulder ball”. But hey, the important thing was that there was at least a show.

Nothing, though, compared to the show that is going on off the pitch. A total scandal in France as Anelka roundly insults his manager Raymond Domenech and is summarily sacked. This might seem a little extreme until you hear what he is reported to have said. This, according to L’Equipe, was “Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute”. A literal translation would have this as “Fuck off, you dirty son of a bitch”. But had I been translating this in a Cambridge unseen, I think I would have preferred the more vernacular and probable English rendition: “Fuck off, you fucking arsehole”. I think that pretty much gets over the sentiment of the comment.

There aren’t a lot of companies where you can say that to your boss without getting fired, and so it comes as no surprise that Anelka is getting the next plane home. But things have not stopped there chez les Bleus. Evra, the captain, almost gets into fisticuffs with the coach, who has resigned. The whole of France is in a torment, with the French sports minister in South Africa and staying until the French have played their last match to make sure that they actually show up for it. OK, I exaggerate that last bit, but she is there to make sure that people face up to their responsibilities.

So the fact that the FA has publicly declared that should England fail to make it through to the next round they are giving a red card to Capello (they can’t actually, as he has just signed another multi-year contract, but they will “expect him to resign”) is small beer. It is inexcusable in my view, to say such a thing publicly, especially to the guy who picked up a team who had failed to qualify for Euro 2008 and got them through the World Cup qualifiers with one defeat in 10 matches. But there you go. It’s the way of management everywhere these days in any company; all managers are on a permanent ejector seat which pops the moment you produce one mediocre result. No one will be firing the Ferrari-driving prima donnas that will actually be running (or trudging) around the pitch, but Capello is already growing his scapegoat horns.

Don’t worry, though. Marcello Lippi is already getting beaten up by the Italian press for failing to produce more than a couple of draws against Slovakia and New Zealand. There hasn’t been much news out of Spain, but I can’t help feeling that the press must be giving their squad a very hard time for losing to Switzerland. So there you have it, the populations of Europe – Spain, France, England and Italy – are all furious. It must be selling no end of papers. I still think that all of these countries will qualify for the next round with the exception of France, who must be wondering who they can actually field for their next match who might not turn around and punt the ball into their own net. Stay tuned. This is turning into a highly entertaining World Cup.

A footballer’s job description

 
 England's Glen Johnson races for the ball against Algeria's Karim Ziani. He's going to get beaten again. Just not quick enough.

 

You know those bits at the end of a job description, where it says what qualities the successful candidate will have? Well, as I look at the World Cup – and think of all the other zillions of matches I have looked at over the years – I reckon it comes down to this:

Ball skill: this is all the stuff you can do with a football, the heading in the right direction, the instant ball control, the shooting and passing accurately, the effect you can give to the ball, the ability to do Ronaldo-style stepovers. It is what makes a footballer rather than, I suppose, a tennis player or a golfer. It’s the stuff that means that a footballer is happy on the ball and that it tends to stick to his feet.

Speed and athleticism: Not much point being good at ball control if you are too slow to get to the ball in the first place. There is a lot of running involved in football, and a lot of that running means being able to run faster than someone else. If you are on the break, you need to outpace the defence to have your chance at goal. If you are a defender, it is essential that you can outstrip the attack if you are to defend successfully. Speed is the most important thing. Then I suppose there is jumping – that’s pretty handy for winning balls in the air. Being physically strong is useful too, but if you are fast enough, it’s probably not essential, although in defence it has to be an advantage. It would be very interesting to have the personal best 100m sprint times of footballers.

Intelligence and imagination: An often neglected feature of the footballer’s make-up, it seems to me. As the game becomes closed down with the opposition all in defence, the only way you can win is to be smarter and quicker than your opponents. The best teams and players have so many ideas that they make scoring goals look very easy. When you run out of good ideas, or they are just so mediocre that the defence has sussed them out immediately and taken the appropriate action, your game goes nowhere. Most teams have a paucity of ideas. But then a lot of footballers aren’t the sharpest knives in the draw. You can spot the difference. A Michel Platini goes on to head up UEFA. You can’t imagine Wayne Rooney heading up anything much. I don’t think I’d ask John Terry to manage a vegetable patch. Football can be a bit like a chess match, trying to work out moves to break through a solid defence. Where it all comes unstuck is when it moves about as fast as a chess match. It is supposed to be high speed stuff. The faster you play, the less time the opposition has to think.

Winning attitude: The will to win is extremely important. You could be fast, bright and skilful, but if you just caved in to the opposition, that wouldn’t get you very far. All successful sportsmen take winning very seriously indeed. The best get extremely annoyed – not to say unpleasant – when they don’t win. For many footballers, you get the impression that winning would be nice, but it doesn’t have to happen at every match. This is a mature attitude that you can respect in everyday life, but doesn’t win you many games on the pitch. With the winning attitude comes its corollary – the refusal to give up. There have been some epic examples of this, notably Manchester Utd finals won in the dying moments of the game, or Liverpool putting in a stonking second half in the final of the Champions League in 2005 against AC Milan having gone 0-3 down at half time, and finally winning it.

I reckon that’s pretty much it for the individual. After that, the manager will take the talent and make a team out of it, but if he doesn’t start with the raw ingredients of skill, speed, intelligence and attitude, he can do what he likes – it isn’t going to work.

As Capello gets a hounding, until next week when by some fluke England will do just enough to scrape into the next round of the World Cup, it would be interesting to mark the England players on the above qualities vs the opposition.

What it looks like is that they are not up to par skillwise, are slow to the ball and not quick enough generally to execute plans, and don’t have a great deal of imagination and flair. Do they want to win enough? Probably, but lacking the other qualities, this might not be sufficient. There is nothing remarkable about the current England team in this respect; it was ever thus (which is why they haven’t won a major competition in the last 44 years – almost half a century).

If Capello was incapable of getting star quality to play together, you might give him some stick, but just how well does the England team fulfil the footballer’s job description? Could that be why there are so many foreign players in the Premiership – because there just aren’t enough interesting home-grown players? Questions, questions.

Still, let’s not be too hard on England. France are abysmal; Spain couldn’t overcome Switzerland (yo!); Holland have been dull; there was nothing remarkable about the Italians and Brazil sent me to sleep. Even Germany, who put in the best opening match, managed to get beaten by Serbia. Could it be that there is something wrong with latter day football itself?